Conferencing systems, in which participants communicate in a conference call or meeting over existing voice and data networks, have grown increasingly complex in recent years in order to increase the number of people able to efficiently participate in a conference call. In any conferencing system, the usage of network resources is a function of the number of participants. In a traditional system, each time an end-user or object initiates a conference session to facilitate a particular call or meeting, a processor, such as a digital signal processor (DSP) associated with a multipoint control unit (MCU), sets up of media streams from the endpoints to a conference server or bridge, where the streams may be mixed and then sent back to the endpoints as individual streams. The limited resource capacity of network devices (mixers, routers, media switches, processors, etc.) coupled with the high demand for conferencing resources, means that it is essential to efficiently allocate and schedule conference call resources on a communications network.
Conference resource scheduling systems typically rely upon various usage metrics to determine the appropriate conference resource to allocate for a given conference. For example, resource usage metrics are often used to allocate a conference bridge—either in advance of a scheduled conference or on an on-demand basis for an ad hoc conference session. A common metric used to determine whether a bridge is to be allocated involves resource usage statistics in conjunction with some sort of round-robin or least-recently used (LRU) algorithm.
One of the problems with relying upon resource usage statistics when allocating conference call resources (such as a bridge) is that such statistics usually do not accurately predict the location in the network where a given user will call or join from to access or initiate a conference session. The physical location of the user in the network is important to efficient resource allocation because it can affect performance considerations such as signal latency, timing and synchronization. Optimizing performance criteria such as signal latency, timing and synchronization are important when attempting to achieve an optimal conference user experience (e.g., good audio quality). For example, if everyone participating in a conference call will be dialing into the call from a certain building, the optimal location of the bridge is at or near that building.